


Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Boq

by chicafrom3



Category: Deviations: The X-Files (comic), The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-15 20:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13038618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicafrom3/pseuds/chicafrom3
Summary: There have been reported sightings of a large, hirsute humanoid in northwestern Washington. Which doesn't satisfactorily explain what Dana Scully is doing in a forest at two-thirty in the morning.





	Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Boq

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wendelah1](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wendelah1/gifts).



**Upstate Washington  
May 15, 1995**

"A lot of Native American tribes had legends similar to what we'd recognize as the Bigfoot myth," Sam said, cheerful despite the weather, swinging her flashlight as she walked so that it was almost useless as a light source. "The Cheyenne, for example, had the Ma'xemestaa'e — humanoid but bigger and covered in shaggy hair. Very shy, they avoided humans as much as possible. The only real difference is that instead of the huge footprint we associate with Bigfoot, the Ma'xemestaa'e had bird-like talons."

"I think you mean claws," Scully corrected. "The talon is the sharp nail birds use for hunting." It had been nearly two years since she'd become one half of the X-Files division and she'd gotten better at hiking through the woods in the middle of the night, but it was still not an experience she particularly enjoyed. Especially not when Sam, with her long legs and easy stride, was strolling along like they were walking through the corridors of Bureau headquarters in DC.

"Do you know," Sam said thoughtfully, "I think you're right about that? On the other hand, the Salish have the Tsiatko who, once again, are oversized humanoids covered in shaggy hair, except unlike the Ma'xemestaa'e the Tsiatko are extremely malevolent. They have a lot in common with Celtic faerie folklore in that respect — leading people astray in the woods at night, driving people to insanity, kidnapping children, taking their revenge on anyone who offended them no matter what lengths they had to go to to do so."

"So now Bigfoot's a faerie? You surprise me, Sam, I was sure you were going to suggest he's an alien."

Sam turned around, still walking, just to grin at her before resuming her monologue. "The Sioux have the Chiyetanka — literally 'Big Elder Brother' — the Bella Coola have the boqs, and of course the Halkomelem have the Sasquatch."

"I was wondering when you'd get to Sasquatch." Scully swept her flashlight beam in a wide circle around them. The woods continued to be empty aside from the two of them and an unpleasantly high number of mosquitoes. And the cold. And the fog. "You're lucky I like you. I wouldn't be out here at — " She checked her watch. " — Two twenty-three in the morning for just anybody."

"I knew we were soulmates."

"What are we doing here, Sam?"

"There have been multiple Bigfoot sightings in this area, including — "

"Yes," Scully cut her off, "I read the case file. The recent sightings are on a level of credibility consistent with the _Weekly World News_. Are we going to be investigating dinosaurs in Brazil and Satan's skull in New Mexico next?"

"I think Brazil's a little out of our jurisdiction, but that skull definitely deserves our attention."

" _Mulder_."

"It's just a nice trip to the forest, Scully." Sam stopped walking and turned slowly in place, letting her flashlight pick out a tree branch here, a spiderweb there. "In fact," she added, "It looks like that's _all_ it's going to be." Scully couldn't tell if she was disappointed or not.

Shaking her head slowly, Scully turned off her flashlight for a moment. "Were you really expecting anything different?"

"Maybe. . . . Maybe not. I was hoping . . . " Sam trailed off, staring into the forest, her expression unreadable in the dim reflect light of her own flashlight.

"What?" Scully tried to follow her gaze but couldn't see anything except trees and darkness. She thumbed the switch on her flashlight. It didn't help. "What were you hoping?"

Sam shook herself out of whatever mood had suddenly overtaken her and turned away from whatever she was staring at. Faked a smile. Samantha Mulder was in many ways an expert liar; she had yet to come up with the false smile that could fool her partner. "I was hoping we'd prove the existence of Bigfoot. Get famous. Validate years of discredited cryptozoologists."

"They're discredited for a reason, Sam."

"Big talk from the physicist. What harm could it do to camp out a little while?"

"It's cold," Scully pointed out, "It's raining — "

"It's barely a drizzle, Scully."

" — and these flashlight batteries aren't going to last all night."

In response, Sam switched off her flashlight and put it away in her coat pocket. "Our eyes will adjust soon enough."

Sighing, Scully followed suit. "How do I let you talk me in to these things?"

"It's that soulmate thing," Sam said, and Scully couldn't help smiling a little, rolled her eyes at the same time. "Besides, admit it. You're curious about whether Bigfoot's real, too."

"In the highly unlikely case that there is such a creature, it couldn't be just one Bigfoot," she said. "No species evolves to create one specimen."

"Maybe he's the last of his kind."

"As you just said yourself, people have been reporting Bigfoot sightings for hundreds of years. The last of his kind?"

Sam exhaled noisily. Then she said, "Maybe that's why he needs to breed with human women."

"Oh, Jesus," Scully muttered.

She sensed rather than saw Sam flash her another mocking smile. "Good thing he's got the two of us to choose from. Options!" After three years working together it had gotten easier to tell when Sam was taking the piss, but she still got it wrong sometimes.

She said, "What are we really doing out here, Mulder? It's obviously not Bigfoot-hunting."

Sam didn't say anything for another long moment. But maybe it was easier to be honest here, in the dark forest in the small hours of the morning without even flashlights to catch the odd expression — she said, "Do you ever think about whether or not we'll ever get any answers?"

What was _that_ supposed to mean? Scully said, "Our solve rate is one of the best in the Bureau. We find more answers than the Violent Crimes Unit — "

"I'm not talking about our solve rate," Sam said. "We've caught some hoaxers, some murderers . . . and, yes, that's a good thing, I'm not saying it isn't, if the only thing I'd ever accomplished in my life was putting John Lee Roche behind bars I'd count that as a life well-spent. But I'm talking about _answers_. What happened to Fox. Are we alone in the universe. Who the hell is that creep constantly surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke and why does he seem to be everywhere. Does he have lung cancer yet."

What had happened to Fox Mulder? The sister he'd saved would never stop asking that question, and Scully knew it. On the other hand . . . "Yes, of course I ask myself all those questions, and I don't know the answers. But, Sam, what does any of this have to do with Bigfoot?"

Sam heaved another sigh. "Bigfoot's just an excuse to come out here. I mean, it's possible some giant hirsute humanoid haunts these woods — or a whole tribe of them with a varied enough population to allow healthy interbreeding, _Dr._ Scully — and discovering that would be fantastic, but our witnesses are, as you so astutely pointed out, not exactly credible. Satan's skull in New Mexico has slightly higher odds of being real. Although I would've expected it to be found in, say, suburban Virginia, maybe."

"Why suburban Virginia?"

"Closest place to Hell I've ever been."

Scully laughed despite herself.

She could almost hear Sam's grin in return. "But the reason why we are here is because of some . . . unsubstantiated reports that would not have cleared an expense report."

"Wait," Scully said, "Tabloid-level reports of Bigfoot _did_ clear an expense report?"

"It got us the plane tickets and hotel room."

"Sometimes I really wonder what's going on in the Bureau's financial department."

Sam almost choked on her laugh. "I think AD Skinner feels the same way sometimes."

He probably did — Scully remembered all too clearly his expression at too many debriefing meetings to count. He was more supportive of their unusual mission statement than most in the FBI, but that didn't mean he didn't find some of their cases to be a complete waste of time. And Bigfoot would probably fall into the latter category. She permitted herself a brief smile, imagining how he would react to their report on _this_ one, and then said, "But what are these unsubstantiated reports that were less credible than Bigfoot sightings?"

"I wouldn't say 'less credible'," Sam said defensively. "'Less numerous', maybe." And then, "There have been a few — not many, but a few — reports of saucer-like craft hovering over this forest — "

Oh, Lord.

" — and corresponding reports of a dark-haired white man in his early thirties visiting witnesses, and the description matches the man who approached us in the park about the John Smith case — "

"The man who _died_ ," Scully reminded her. An inexplicable death, yes — she had yet to come up with an explanation for a human body dissolving into green sludge in front of multiple witnesses. But the stranger was still dead.

Sam ignored that. " — and I thought it bore investigation."

Scully took a deep, bracing breath. Or tried to. She was cold and wet and tired and there was a tree branch poking into her back. Not perfect conditions for a brief moment to gather her thoughts. "And you couldn't have told me about this _before_ we flew out to the Pacific Northwest?"

"Would you have come if I did?"

In all honesty, it was a fifty-fifty chance. It was a wild goose chase, even wilder than most of their cases, just a tenuous thread to a dead man whose involvement in the conspiracy against their work was unknown — but she'd found, over the past two years, that she agreed to all kinds of insane ideas when Sam did little more than ask.

"And anyway," Sam said, "Just because there's _also_ spaceship sightings doesn't mean Bigfoot _doesn't_ hang out around here."

"What am I doing here?" Scully asked the sky, rhetorically. It remained a silent, dark gray void above her, unresponsive and hard to see through the trees.

"Aw, come on, Scully. You know you'd rather be chasing yeti with me than spending the night at home with a Jose Chung novel or whatever."

"I think they're only Yeti when they're in the Himalayas," Scully said.

"Don't be pedantic."

She had to be. She didn't have any other response. There wasn't even a new Chung out, she'd just be rereading _The Lonely Buddha_ for the twelfth time and ordering in Chinese food. Although whether or not that would be a better night than shivering in a Washington forest remained to be seen.

At least it was dark enough that she didn't have to look at Sam quietly gloating about having proven her point.

She said, "What would you even do if you found this guy and he wasn't dead?"

"You mean Bigfoot?"

" _Samantha_."

Sam sighed loudly. Said, "I don't know. Arrest him on spurious charges and interrogate him. Ask him what happened in the park. What he knows about John Smith, or whoever it was who impersonated me. Why he said my name the way he did . . . "

"And do you think he'd give you any answers?"

There was no response.

Scully wasn't completely surprised. "Look," she said, "Even in the unlikely case that — " That the man witnesses described seeing was in fact the same one who'd come to confiscate their evidence. That he somehow wasn't dead. That he had answers to Sam's questions and was willing to share. "Even in the unlikely case that Bigfoot exists," she said instead, "And the even more unlikely case that Bigfoot spends his time lurking in Washington forests, what makes you think he'd risk being caught by two federal agents?"

Another pause, and then Sam said, voice abruptly much lighter, "I'm not sure that I believe this creature understands the concept of federal organizations."

"I feel like he — or they — would have needed to develop an understanding, if they were really going to evade humans proving their existence for so long."

"Ah," Sam said, "But historically speaking federal organizations and investigators like you and I are a very recent development; creatures like the Ma'xemestaa'e and the Chiyetanka mastered evading capture long before the FBI was a thing."

"But that was when this land was largely undeveloped," Scully pointed out. "We're talking mostly forest with the occasional town or crop field — now it's primarily human settlements and very little undeveloped forest. Much harder to hide in without knowing your opponent's habits."

"See, Scully, now you're getting into the spirit!"

Scully laughed without intending to. Sam had that effect on her. "Anyway, I haven't seen any sign of either Sasquatch _or_ flying saucers, but — " She stopped, almost mid-syllable, not quite finishing the _t_ sound.

Sam waited a moment for her to finish, then said, "What?"

"Samantha." Scully dropped her voice to a hiss barely audible over the wind and mosquitoes. "Don't move too fast, don't turn on your light, but — just behind you. It might be nothing, I can't see very clearly — just look. _Carefully_."

"Dana Scully, I swear to God, if you're messing with me — "

"Keep your voice down! If it's a bear it might not have noticed us yet."

"A bear. Right."

She couldn't see Sam's face, just a darker-gray silhouette against the grayness of the foggy woods, but that was enough; she could see her turn, slowly and carefully, to look behind her at —

Nothing at all.

"You asshole," Sam said. She was already laughing and Scully didn't feel bad at all.

"Gotcha."

"You didn't have me for a moment, I knew you were joking."

"You really thought Bigfoot was going to lurch out of those trees."

"I did not. Also I don't think Bigfoot lurches."

"Admit it," Scully said, "I got you."

"I admit nothing. I was not gotten. I knew what you were doing the whole time. Is it starting to rain harder?"

"Now you're changing the subject."

"I think it's starting to rain harder."

It was. What had been a persistent and annoying misting was now distinct raindrops, each one making its impact felt on Scully's shoulders. She sighed. "What is it? Another two miles back to the car?"

"Cheer up, Scully." Sam switched her flashlight back on. It made almost no difference. "Maybe we'll be abducted by aliens on the way."


End file.
